iPhone 6: How To Shoot 4K Video

The iPhone 6, unlike many current flagship smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S6, does not support 4K video. That is, at least, not officially.

Thankfully, by means of an app, you can push the video recording resolution of your iPhone or iPhone 6 Plus way beyond its specified 1080p standard towards something pretty close to 4K.

What is 4K Video?

4K video has become a catch-all term for video with a horizontal pixel resolution of around 4,000 pixels. It’s a term used interchangeably with the most commonly-used consumer format, Ultra HD, which features four times the pixel resolution of 1080p, providing frames of 3840 by 2160 pixels. In this article, I’ll be using “4K” as a shorthand for Ultra HD.

Why doesn't the iPhone 6 record in 4K as standard?

Many consumer video cameras, including smartphones, now offer Ultra HD video as a recording option, but not so the iPhone 6. The 8 megapixel sensor in iPhone 6 allows for image capture at up to 3264 by 2448 pixels, falling a little short of the 8.3 megapixels required to shoot Ultra HD. These pixels are also arranged in a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than the 16:9 widescreen format used to display Ultra HD.

The iPhone 6’s hardware is powerful enough to capture full 8 megapixel frames at 30 frames per second, but
Apple has decided this feature isn’t ready for prime time yet, limiting the phone instead to the 1080p standard which works exceptionally well and supports features such as time lapse and super-smooth 240fps slow-motion video not found on other handsets.

Apps to the rescue

However, Ultra HD functionality is available to iOS apps and there are a number available which can capture 8 megapixel video and output it in standard 4K formats.

Vizzywig 8xHD

i4software’s Vizzywig 4K made Ultra HD video recording possible on an iPhone 6 by shooting 24 high resolution photos per second and then combining them into 4K video clips. The big catch was the price - the app would set you back an eye-watering $1,000 from the App Store.

A recent name change to Vizzywig 8xHD brought with it a massive price drop to $49.99. It can capture uncompressed video and provides advanced features such as real-time editing, built in music tracks and fully manual controls, but this is still way out of the price range of many who would like to try 4K video just for fun.

Thankfully there are now alternative iPhone 6 video apps supporting 4K capture at much more affordable prices.

Ultrakam 4k

First up is Ultrakam 4k, by Hassan Uriostegui. Available for $9.99 from the iTunes, it’s a fully-featured video recording app which has previously delivered 2K and 3K video recordings on older iPhone handsets. This latest version adds 4K capability to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus along with a host of other useful features.

Ultrakam 4k showing 4K video settings.

While UltraKam certainly unlocks a huge selection of features for your iPhone, 4K recording is arguably the least impressive among them, limited as it is to a 4:3 aspect ratio and without any image stabilisation.

UltraKam supports direct upload to Youtube in its “4K quality” mode, but this does not match the 2160p resolution used by the video streaming service. Although Ultrakam outputs more vertical pixels, it falls short of the 3840 pixel horizontal resolution used by Youtube. Youtube 4K videos generally don’t look that good anyway, with plenty of compression artefacts usually in evidence.

ProCam 2 sticks to the familiar 16:9 aspect ratio, capturing video at a resolution of 3264x1836 pixels which it then upscales to 3840x 2160. This provides the widescreen format most of us would prefer to use for video, but actually captures a lower resolution image than Ultrakam as it crops out some of the pixels in the vertical direction. ProCam 2 provides 8 megapixel video capture at 24fps or 30fps.

ProCam2 Shoots 4K Video with an optional upgrade

ProCam 2 costs $1.99 from the app store, but to unlock the 4K video recording you’ll have to make an in-app payment of $4.99, making it still a little less expensive than Ultrakam 4k.

Both of these apps are great photo and video apps in their own right, providing a huge array of features not found in the standard Apple Camera app and are well worth having even if you don’t end up using 4K out of anything more than mere curiosity. Video capture at 4K seems to be right at the limit of what the iPhone 6 is capable of in terms of performance, with both apps suggesting tricks such as closing unused apps and restarting the phone to ensure smooth capture.

Ultra HD video also consumes far more storage than regular HD video: a one-minute clip consuming anywhere from 800MB to 2GB depending on the app and settings used. This means you're likely to run out of space pretty rapidly on your iPhone.

Conclusion

While an approximation of Ultra HD video is possible with an iPhone 6, it’s limited by the resolution of the camera’s sensor and therefore not quite up to the level of quality you might expect. Neither does it deliver the rock-solid performance and user experience Apple would require to release such a feature officially. It also disables optical image stabilisation on the iPhone 6 Plus and very quickly fills up the phone’s non-expandable storage.

These are all good reasons for Apple to omit 4K recording from the iPhone for now, but at least with the help of such apps you can create, edit and upload Ultra HD video without having to purchase a separate camera.

Both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus already shoot excellent video in 1080p resolution and support great features such as 240fps slow motion and timelapse modes. All of the apps I’ve mentioned can improve things further by adding a slew of creative manual controls and options.

You may not really need 4K video, but now you can at least tell your smug Android-toting friends that your iPhone 6 can do it too. Kinda. However, the reality is that if 4K video is important to you there are much better ways of creating it than with a smartphone of any description. When Apple finally gets around to officially supporting 4K video, I fully expect it to be done properly - and that means starting with an image sensor with more than 8 megapixels.